The Civil Human Rights Front, an illegal umbrella organization of opposition groups and the biggest platform for their subversive activities in Hong Kong, announced on Sunday its disbandment amid growing public demand for the Hong Kong Police Force to launch a criminal investigation into the anti-China syndicate’s illegal activities and bring its leaders to justice. The CHRF in its heyday boasted nearly 50 member groups but counted only eight at the end. It was a fitting end to the prolific criminal enterprise. Members of the public cannot wait for the group’s operatives to get their just deserts for the damage they have done to Hong Kong society over the years.
The demise of the CHRF was a significant event, marking another milestone in the process of bringing Hong Kong back on the right track of socioeconomic development. From now on, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region can focus on pursuing long-term prosperity and stability, as well as tackling its deep-seated social problems.
The CHRF was set up in 2002 to bring all major anti-China groups together for “strength in numbers” and control of resources. In that year the HKSAR government started working on national security legislation according to Article 23 of the Basic Law and the opposition camp was hell-bent on derailing the constitutional undertaking by all means necessary, believing that a legal loophole was conducive to their political cause. It was a daunting task, and a command center was needed to pull it off. The CHRF came into being with a bang by forcing the HKSAR government to withdraw the national security legislation in 2003 and remained the de facto central command of all anti-China groups in Hong Kong till the end. Along the way it earned more stripes of evil distinction, most notably in the “Occupy Central” illegal movement in the fall of 2014 and the anti-extradition-law amendment bill campaign in 2019, which became a full-blown “color revolution” complete with street violence and domestic terrorism. The “black revolution” was halted in July 2020 after the National People’s Congress Standing Committee enacted the National Security Law for Hong Kong on June 30 last year. The very last collective “act of defiance” by the CHRF was an illegal poll called the “35-plus primary” aimed at manipulating the results of the seventh-term Legislative Council election, which will be held in December. The ultimate objective was to snatch the governing power of the HKSAR by taking control of LegCo. But the plot turned out to be the beginning of the end for the CHRF.
The CHRF was never registered with the SAR government according to relevant Hong Kong laws, and that means it was an illegal organization and had to borrow registered member groups’ bank accounts to handle “donations” and other transactions, including suspected money laundering and handling money from foreign hostile forces
What is the essence of democracy? It is building consensus through rational and fair consultation, not constant confrontation. The CHRF was formed expressly to work against the sovereign State, the rule of law and the HKSAR government altogether, by trampling democracy under the disguise of “fighting for democracy”. Many of its member groups became increasingly radical and eventually turned into “mutual destruction” advocates during the “black revolution”. Some leading figures of its member groups were groomed as poster children of its subversive cause with generous funding and support from their overseas patrons, leading the traitorous charges on legislative, street and international fronts at the expense of Hong Kong society.
Throughout its illegal existence, the CHRF did everything it could to exorcise the spirit of democracy in Hong Kong residents’ minds and had the audacity to declare “the seed of freedom and democracy will take root in people’s hearts” after its demise. In this sense the CHRF failed its Western patrons by going out with a whiff when they expected it to be a handy tool for their own geopolitical strategy against China.
The CHRF always insisted it pursued “peace, rationality and nonviolence” but managed to turn every protest march, legal or otherwise, into a violent riot one way or another over the years. In doing so, it violated numerous residents’ right to live a normal life and trampled their freedom from living in fear of street violence perpetrated by the CHRF followers. In fact, its political objective required frequent disruption of public order to undermine Hong Kong’s socioeconomic development to put pressure on the government.
In the past 19 years the CHRF brainwashed many young people with such crazy ideas as “achieving justice by breaking the law”, “sometimes violence can be a viable solution to certain problems” and “a criminal record enriches one’s life experience”. As a result, thousands of misguided youths took to “violent struggles” against the police during illegal assemblies, believing they were fighting the “bad guys”, with many of them getting a criminal record as promised.
Despite repeated denials by the CHRF leadership core, it is public knowledge that the opposition camp in Hong Kong received generous funding and other forms of assistance from the US government and other anti-China hostile forces, and the CHRF was a main recipient for years. For example, the CHRF maintained close contact with an affiliate of the National Endowment for Democracy, a shady fixture in charge of funding “regime change” in countries the US government deems potential threats to its interests or global hegemony, and received financial support from the NED through that affiliate.
Some of its prominent representatives, such as Joshua Wong Chi-fung and Dennis Kwok Wing-hang, flew to Washington, where they “urged” the US government to impose more sanctions against China, including the HKSAR. It came as no surprise when a research institute in the US found out the NED funded most of the opposition groups involved in the “black revolution”, which started in June 2019 with the anti-extradition-law amendment bill campaign, and many of those groups were CHRF members. Given its primary mission of jeopardizing the implementation of the “one country, two systems” principle in Hong Kong, the CHRF also got help from separatist forces in Taiwan and elsewhere.
The CHRF was never registered with the SAR government according to relevant Hong Kong laws, and that means it was an illegal organization and had to borrow registered member groups’ bank accounts to handle “donations” and other transactions, including suspected money laundering and handling money from foreign hostile forces. Those shady operations inevitably led many people to believe the CHRF violated the National Security Law for Hong Kong, which is why police invetigations will continue even after its disbandment.
The author is a Hong Kong member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and chairman of the Hong Kong New Era Development Thinktank.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.